


Stamp'd On These Lifeless Things

by halotolerant



Category: A Room With a View - E. M. Forster
Genre: M/M, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-10-01
Updated: 2010-10-01
Packaged: 2017-10-12 08:28:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/122926
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/halotolerant/pseuds/halotolerant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the events of the novel, Cecil bumps into Freddie, or rather Freddie collides with him</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stamp'd On These Lifeless Things

**Author's Note:**

> Written in the Yuletide 2008 Challenge for calliope85, betaed very kindly at the last moment by loathlylady

It was the habit of Mr Cecil Vyse (a man for whom habit was a kind of virtue) to spend the Wednesday afternoon of every week perusing the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum. He had no great affection for medieval art, and an instinctive disinclination toward some of the classical galleries, but porcelain always diverted him, for all he feared it was a domestic and almost feminine taste.

He was passing across the neat mosaics of the main entrance, in search of a new exhibit (they might, he thought, employ attendants that spoke a tolerable accent to direct one about the place) when a whirlwind emerged through the doors and barrelled straight into him.

Disentangled, the whirlwind righted itself, picked up its cap and Cecil's hat and Cecil's cane and Cecil's pince-nez, and began a scattergun, enthusiastic, unembarrassed apology, when suddenly it cried out, "Cecil Vyse! 'Pon my word, Cecil! It's been a living age, how are you?"

And Cecil saw, not without some automatic horror, the smiling face of Freddy Honeychurch.

Straightening his tie, he gave a short bow, felt ridiculous in doing so given that he had moments earlier had a mouth full of the man's sleeve, and accepted his possessions.

"I am well, thank you. I take it you are also?"

"Frantic, at the moment!" Freddy ran a hand over his thick, black, curling hair and, giving up the attempt to tidy it, shoved his cap back over it all. "More exams. They mean to kill us with exams, I'm sure of it. I can't see how knowing the names of all the bones in a man's foot shall help me cure him, and he certainly shan't care if I can tell him what he broke, only whether or not it can be fixed! Anyhow, Prendergast -- a friend of mine, excellent fellow -- said when he feels like his brain's boiling over he comes here and diagnoses the statuary. So here I am."

Cecil agreed that this was certainly so, expressed non-comittal sympathy (medicine was no occupation for a man of Freddy's class, be he ever so unlikely to succeed in another) and explained, self-deprecatingly, his own program of improvement.

"It must be wonderful not to have better things to do," Freddy enthused, innocently and without a hint of a dig. "Some days I barely even read the paper. Or eat. I'm absolutely famished - they do a tea here, don't they?"

Cecil had long regarded the installation of eateries within museums as promoting entirely the wrong sort of person (art, good art, should preclude a wish to consume mere material things) but confirmed that indeed the meal could be obtained.

"Join me then, and have a real catching up. Mother will want to know all about you and how you do - your mother apparently never writes in specifics. Not but what I'm sure that's more ladylike, really," he added, hastily.

Cecil hesitated. It was undeniably flattering to be so solicited - his company was rarely sought on its own merits, he was well aware, and although the principle of the thing stood, it had been some hours since his luncheon at his club.

Falling into step with Freddy, he made his way through the high-ceilinged corridors to the colour and gaiety of the Museum's tea room, whose fine tiles and elegant pillars rendered it among the more beautiful and instructive of any such facility.

They established themselves on a corner table, and were soon brought tea, scones, jam, cake and sandwiches that were, though few, otherwise irreproachable.

Freddy looked much as Cecil remembered him. Three years had passed since Freddy had driven him away from Windy Corner and his planned association with Lucy Honeychurch. In that time he had seen Freddy once - at the marriage of a mutual family friend - and Lucy, now Mrs Emerson, not at all. He had been surprised at the wedding how much pain it caused him to see Freddy, and had placed the cause with the young man's similarity to his sister and the associations he necessarily carried.

One might have hoped that, with more time, this pain would have lessened. But sitting opposite Freddy now and hearing him discourse on medical training, Cecil was aware of a kind of discomfort persisting; it was not relaxing to be here in this manner. Even sitting still, Freddy retained his whirlwind qualities; disruptive and energetic. Cecil feared very much that his dislike of this was linked on some primal, irrational level to envy.

"And now, really," Freddy interrupted his own story abruptly. "I've dragged you along and then talked only of myself. Tell me everything."

Cecil sat up straighter in his chair.

"I must plead guilty of living a very dull life, I'm afraid. I still prefer reading to the more athletic pursuits and, indeed, to most forms of company." He was aware as he spoke that he was being ghastly, and did not know quite how to escape it. "I travel to the Continent in the spring and view the notable antiquities. I am still unmarried."

Why he included this last he did not know. It sounded altogether too much like a reproach to Freddy's sister, which might be wounding.

Freddy did flush a little, and moved a crumb around his plate. "Marriage is an old man's game. For people who've no fun left to have."

Cecil nodded and summoned the waitress for the bill; this meeting was a mistake and he should never have agreed to it, he saw that now. Impossible that it should bring anything but a plunge back to the horrible confusion and uncertainty of three years ago.

Alone, Cecil could be Cecil. When she broke their engagement, Lucy had said to him that when he came into contact with other people he destroyed them. What she had not seen was that the reverse was true - around others, Cecil was never how he wanted to be.

Freddy insisted on splitting the bill. Cecil insisted that he pay, then saw it might be taken as an insult to the man's independence and gave up, just as Freddy was - perhaps with relief - placing his wallet back in his jacket pocket.

"Now, will you come and see the galleries with me?" Freddy pushed his chair in after he left the table, Cecil noted with an automatic snobbish horror.

Cecil opened his mouth to refuse - he and Freddy were only capable of annoying each other and to view the statues from the perspective of anatomical science was surely an anathema to true artistic taste.

There was in an impulse in him, then, of a kind that men such as Freddy feel all the time and that many people in the world live by entirely. An urge to do at once what seems most pleasurable at the time, without recourse to analysis.

"I should like to," he heard himself say, and found that it was true. There was something about Freddy's presence reminiscent of a time Cecil had walked through a street at night and heard cheap, ill-played music spill out from the window of a charity concert hall. It had grated upon his refined ears, he'd been sure, and yet the invitation within it to dance had been so strong that his step had fallen into rhythm before he could stop himself.

Freddy grinned and they set off once more together.

The more important of the statues, Cecil already knew, were housed in a kind of quadrangle around the open square in the centre of the museum, so that daylight might come through the extremely wide windows. He had never thought to go there at sunset, which - it being December - they found to be occurring. Pink, fiery light illuminated the marbles with almost a vital glow, and there was instantly something of the pagan temple about the gallery that Cecil had never felt before.

Freddy suited such surroundings; his hair and his tanned skin made him quite the young Greek, and his careful study of the Apollo they stood before could be imagined as religious devotion.

Cecil removed his pince-nez and cleaned them with his handkerchief. He was not normally given to such flights of fancy.

"They have the muscles so perfectly," Freddy observed in a murmur. "I wonder if they used to dissect corpses, or if they had models with such a physique one could see it all." He looked once more up and down the figure, muttering to himself, "Trapezius, teres minor, teres major, latissimus dorsi and... dash it, what's the other? "

"You have studied Latin? It would assist you, I think, in the recollection."

"My school would say I studied Latin." Freddy laughed and shrugged. "I think I was dreaming in most of it. I imagined myself as a hero of Troy, scaling walls and shooting people with arrows! But these are helping me, Prendergast was right. One sees the human body so differently when it is made ideal and beautiful like this."

A certain look came into his eye and, as if it were a natural thing to do, he rested a hand on the swell of the Apollo's buttock, opening his mouth just a little to breathe out a sigh of appreciation.

Cecil knew he should stop him; no matter how engaging, art was not meant to be touched. He found himself, however, in difficulties when he tried to speak. He stepped closer. Freddy turned around and looked at him. The look in his eyes had not vanished at all; under it, Cecil felt something rather like fear.

He swallowed, feeling an overwhelming need to say something before Freddy did. "I could perhaps assist you with the Latin, as far as my own small powers go. As you have stated, I require occupation."

For a moment, Freddy did not move. His eyes became a little softer and kinder. Then he reached out a hand, that same hand with which he'd touched the statue. He grasped Cecil's shoulder warmly.

"I shan't pay you, you know" Freddy said, smiling.

Cecil laughed quite easily and naturally; it broke over him in a flood of joy. He was undoubtedly being unacceptably loud and he found he did not care in the slightest.


End file.
